4!

Graham at four weeks exactly. He is getting some chubby cheekies!

Graham is four weeks old already! Time is flying. Seth's current favorite nicknames for him are (g)Ram-bo and Grahambunctious. I'm sure there are many, many more names to come from daddy. I do feel like his Beast nickname is slowly being used less and less, but it will never be completely forgotten.

The first three and a half weeks of his life Graham went to bed pretty early and woke up to eat a few times a night and then went right back to sleep. Lately he has decided he is a night owl and he stays up until midnight or one every night. But he sleeps pretty much all day until fiveish in the evening, so how can I complain?

I think one of Graham's favorite things to do is to cuddle with me. Sometimes in the afternoon he has a hard time sleeping but if I decide to take a nap with him he settles down and snuggles right up to me and sleeps soundly. His last "night" feeding is usually around six a.m. so I bring him in to my room to feed him and hopefully get another hour or two of sleep. He is so cute all cuddled up in my bed. He likes to sleep on his side with his hands under his head like he is in a posed sleep position. I need to get a picture! He always looks so calm and precious. (I do have a nice healthy dose of guilt going on because I hardly take any pictures of Graham right now and if I missed taking a picture of Charlie for one whole day the first six months of her life I felt like a failure. Hopefully he won't feel bad when he is older!)

Graham does have a pretty bad case of baby acne right now and I keep thinking that if this is a sign of what is to come when he is a teenager he is going to be in trouble! Charlie had some bad baby skin too but Cortizone 10 took it right away, whereas Graham's just keeps coming back no matter what I do. (I think Charlie's was more rashy and Graham's is more pimply.) Every now and then I think he is clearing up and then BAM! he has a huge flare up again. And the poor boy has a picker for a mother. Someone really needs to tell her to stop. (I always say either you are born a picker or you aren't and there is no hope for you to change either way.)

Every now and then there is a situation where I can't get to Graham to calm him down right away--in the car, for example. One day when Charlie was really concerned that Graham was crying, and I was doing nothing for him, I told her that maybe he would like her to sing him a song. So she sang him the "ABCDs" as Charlie calls them and he really did calm down. She was so proud of herself! Since then she starts to sing to him pretty much any time he starts crying. Today Charlie came into my bathroom while I was in the shower to inform me that Graham has started to cry. (Why while I am always in the shower?!?!?!) And so I rushed to finish and when I got into his room Graham was crying at the top of his lungs and Charlie was singing I'm A Child of God at the top of her lungs trying to calm him down.

Speaking of calming Graham down, it is so easy to do! A lot of times the sound of my voice calms him down, but if that isn't enough just picking him up immediately calms him down. We are so blessed to have such an easy going guy. However, he does seem to constantly have a scowl on his face when he is awake. His scowl is so expressive I swear I know what he is thinking. Usually I assume something like this, "What in the world is going on? Why am I being subjected to this? Ugg, life is hard." And I do tell him that all the time, "Life is hard, little guy! Get used to it." We love our Graham!

Life is hard!